And The Ant asked, What was that?
by Wanderlustlover
Summary: Catherine's thought process after the talk with G'Kar in 'Mind War'.


Universe: Babylon 5  
  
Time line: Right after "Mind War" (Season I)  
  
Disclaimer: Catherine's thought process after the talk with G'Kar.   
  
And The Ant asked, "What was that?"  
  
Watching him walk away at that moment, Catherine Sakai could not help but think on the advice he'd given her. Strange, metaphoric, and confusing, but advice that she could no less forget than truly understand. A day ago she would have thought him nothing more than an arrogant Narn in a position of too much power, and though that might be still true, he had also, both; warned her of danger and saved her from it when she refused to take heed to that warning.   
  
Her eyes skipped across the people milling around her like a stone might over water, catching on certain costumes, races or faces, but continuing on without soaking in even the smallest detail about those costumes, races or faces. Her mind adrift with things she could neither explain nor begin to understand, she felt awash in a see of humans and aliens who neither noticed nor bothered her where she stood.  
  
On autopilot, it all ran over her mind, over and over and over. Universal Terraform had requested that she and her team survey a new planet that had very hopefully prospects of containing more Quantium 40. Qunatium 40 meant three very good things. The first, more jump gates could finish construction. The second, more jump gates would mean even more work for her team. The third, another cut, that if it looked like the last one, would have been reason enough to celebrate for nights on end.   
  
And Sigma 957, the planet she had been contracted to survey, was nothing like what she excepted it to be. She had been warned by Ambassador G'Kar about the danger of this planet. She'd blown it off like many a warning she'd priorly received because she'd survived dangerous situations, raiding parties, and other species who couldn't tolerate her presence near their borders of space. Why should she have thought this warning to be any different than those?   
  
And what she'd seen? Could she even put it into words? A ship, but yet not a ship. Bigger than any ship she'd ever heard of. Bigger than the tales of the Minbari battle cruisers and the pictures that had captured even it to a picture. Almost as big as a planet, but not a planet either. A configuration of light, power and color. So many colors in patterns unnumbered. Movement without pattern, method or reason.   
  
A thing -whatever it was- that could open and close it's own jump gates. A thing that no know race -save perhaps, the Vorlons- could do. And even the idea that the Vorlons had created the jump gates was still rumor and pure speculation.   
  
"Ouch!" Catherine let out suddenly, grasping her hand back from the table. Bringing it up to her face in shock, she shook her hand from the ant that was crawling down her hand. It went flying to the dark patterned floor, a dart of black and red against it, though it could not move faster than her eyes could follow it.   
  
Raising a foot she stomped it down. Then she raised her foot, but to her surprise watched the ant unscathed still trying to scurry away in all haste. She raised her foot to try again and stopped suddenly.   
  
G'Kar said he knew about that sector. He'd alluded to the fact his people had tried to experiment with contacting or interacting with the thing, the entity out there near Sigma 957. He'd said that they weren't any better off communicating with that entity that the ant were with them. That, as if in picking up an ant, all they could do next to this thing, was look up and ask; 'what was that?'.  
  
That if they were perceived as anything by that entity, this thing perhaps billions of years elder than them, that it was as nothing more than a scurrying insect. A bi-ped creature that was not so much lower it didn't not deserve of contact, but so different, that there was so little possibility of being able to communicate with.   
  
The ant vanished, lost to her eyes within the pattern, and she lowered her foot slowly, raising her hand to her face. Perhaps they might not be capable of communication, she frowned thinking as she looked at the throbbing part of her finger the ant had bitten, but perhaps that didn't make them powerless either. Maybe they, too, like the ants, still had the ability to strike back, even if they were so much smaller in comparison. Maybe they still had the ability to make such an entity of proportion to them, as the ants were to them, stop and ask;  
  
'What was that?' 


End file.
